07 December 2006

Integrate AdThis social bookmarker with Blogger Beta

In October 2006, I decided to use a google product - Blogger Beta - to manage my blog. So far, I am not sure it a wise idea because so far coz I don't like much the templating system.

Like today, I have lost about 1 hour fighting with the horribilis XML language used by the blogger beta template system. So I thought I could share my "google beta hack" with the world. I was looking for a way of integrating an addthis.com button to the bottom of each post. After a quick googling, I found a post with a snippet explaining how to do it. Unfortunately, it did not work because of stupid XML rules (grrrr).

I could not put the code in the post because blogger doesn't deal very well with html source code, so you can download this snippet here (only 3 lines)

That will generate a addthis.com bar which will look like:

As far as I am concerned, XML in this case, adds more complexity but nothing else ! What's the point of languages if humans can't read them, there must be a way of making better abstactions to represent the template and layout of a blog!!!

By the way, I am typing this Post using Google Docs & Spreadsheets ;-) I sold my soul to Google! At some point, we'll have to find a soluton to free ourself from this corporation ...

4 comments:

protesto said...

Hi Michel,

Thanks for informing me about the problem. It was working when I was posting the code. I couldn't find the problem as well. Same code for socializer work well :

<a expr:href='"http://ekstreme.com/socializer/?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Social bookmark this post'>Social bookmark this post</a>

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for the hack! It seems to work great. Have you tried using Socializer at all? I'm curious which one works better.

The Alpha Project

Jean-Michel said...

No, I haven't and I won't! This kind of things should not tqke 1-2 hours as it took me ... The Widgets Revolution has just begun!

Lisa D. said...

I don't even know you, but I think I love you. You fixed all my problems! You forgot to say where to copy the code, so I just stuck it in the same place the guy who recommended you said to use for socializer, and hey, that worked. Good Job, and keep it up. And I think I love you...